Podcast

Tuesday, December 02, 2014

Rulebook Casefile: Ironic Sequence of Events in Do the Right Thing

So we’ve
established that Do the Right Thing
has a very unique structure: Like most stories, it is
about a large problem, but instead of watching a hero solve
that problem, we’re watching the crisis slowly build, spotting a progression of factors that no
one character can see.

Even so, only on subsequent viewings do we realize that almost every scene has contributed to the final
crisis, often in very ironic ways.Here, as I see it, are all the contributing factors, and where they come in the timeline:

18:43 Sal has a bat under the counter and in the Wall of
Fame scene we see that he’s quick to take it out.

21:43 Buggin’ tells Mookie to “Stay black.”

23:00 Da Mayor tells Mookie to “Do the right thing,” which
seems to gnaw at him throughout the movie.

26:27 After turning off the fire hydrant (and seeing that
the locals have humiliated an Italian-American driver) the Italian-American
cop says he’ll bust heads if he has to come back.

33:20 We see in Raheem’s boombox duel with the Puerto
Ricans that being forced to turn down your radio is a defeat, a personal
humiliation, a threat to manhood

35:05 Buggin’ has his white Air Jordans run over by a
white bicyclist, who bought a brownstone on the block.And the guy is wearing a Larry Bird jersey
(Lee hints in the commentary that the characters would have taken this
jersey as a brazen display of white pride).

39:19 The cornermen are increasingly angry that all of the
businesses are owned by non-blacks.

51:35 Raheem gives Mookie his personal philosophy of love
and hate, ending with “If I love you, I love you, but if I hate you…”

53:32 Sal doesn’t say please when he asks Raheem to turn
down his radio the first time.

59:20 Pino yells at Smiley (just after Sal tells Pino that
he won’t move) and the neighborhood overhears and heckles back.

103:45 Everybody mocks Buggin’s attempts to recruit them,
so he starts to calm down, and just starts to clean his Jordans, but
Mookie says that his Jordons are dogged, causing Buggin’ to get angry all
over again.

115:19 Mookie doesn’t like Sal’s friendship with
Jade.

127:30 Smiley is a mentally challenged person walking
around unsupervised, and unlike most challenged people in movies, he isn’t
serene all the time, so he’s agitating everyone.

127:30 Buggin’ Out happens to run into Radio Raheem and
their free-floating animostities combine on a semi-randomly selected
target.Then Smiley adds his anger
to theirs.

130:00 When Raheem, Buggin’, and Smiley show up to demand
pictures on the wall, Sal doesn’t just yell about Raheem’s music, he calls
it “jungle music.”Obviously, this
is followed by the big one, where Sal smashes Raheem’s radio with his bat.

140:00 The crowd reveals that they are angry over previous
police murders (the characters shout out the names of real-life police
victims Eleanor Bumpers, Michael Stewart, et al.)

So that’s
almost everything right?Even the
seemingly happy moments, like the fire hydrant scene, ironically contribute the
final tragedy.But in fact there’s
another, much smaller list of elements that don’t
contribute to the crisis:

Everything with Senor Love Daddy, who is the ultimate in
chill.

Vito’s friendliness with Mookie doesn’t contribute one way
or another.

The anger of the teens at Da Mayor.

The scene where Raheem’s batteries die and he gets more
from the Korean grocers.

Da Mayor rescues the kid from getting hit by an ice cream
truck leads to peace between Da Mayor and Mother Sister.

Everything with Tina and Hector (Mookie’s child) including
the sex scene.

It’s crucial
that these moments are included.Unlike
most stories, which assure us that we are following the linear progression of
one problem, so that every scene “counts”, this sort of story must do the
opposite: if we suspect that every element of this story is part on clockwork
machine, the movie would feel grim and preachy: “Behold The Folly of Man!”

By
interspersing the 23 elements that contribute with 6 that don’t, Lee keeps our
eye off the ball, allowing us to just relax and enjoy this vibrant world,
without having to feel that we’re riding a fixed escalator of racial
tension.We sense that something bad is
coming, but we don’t know how or where it will arrive.In fact, we cling to our hope that moderating
influences like Da Mayor or Vito will ensure that things can’t get too bed. This way, when everything finally goes to hell,
it feels much more tragic that it would have Lee had merely set us up in order
to knock us down.

In the end, many
elements contribute ironically, some elements contribute directly, and a few
elements contribute not at all. That’s the most powerful way to tell this
story, because that’s the way the world works.